Punch Club Review

Punch Club is a micro management boxing simulation that is equal parts fun equal parts challenge.

At the core Punch Club throws tons of 80’s and 90’s love at players in the form of a sims type game. Don’t go into this expecting to do any fighting at all as the game does all that for you. Don’t think that all fun is lost however. This game will have you micromanaging every tiny aspect as well. You will train your boxer increasing his strength, stamina, and agility. Don’t forget to factor in your eating, sleeping, energy, work, money, quests, and side quests. Managing your fighter isn’t for the weak of heart or mind.

On the boxing end of things you can upgrade your fighter with new moves and skills to use during the fight. You unlock those with points earned during fights while climbing through the ranks. What you might not fully realize at first is how vital certain upgrades are and that even though one layout may work for a fight that you’ll have to completely switch it up for the next fight. This could take some getting used to though and is simply found out by going through the game over and over again.

The bigger aspect of the game however isn’t the boxing, but what your life revolves around outside of boxing. You’ll quickly come to see that time management is huge. You’ll need to eat and sleep to refill energy and other bars. You’ll need money to feed yourself though which requires work. Time spent working though takes away from training time. Now no matter how much you train at the end of every day you’ll still lose stats so it becomes a never ending quest to figure out what to do most and in which order will give you the most effectiveness.

Another factor that helps Punch Club is that it is a lot deeper then one may believe. Aside from your main quest to raise the ranks in the ring you can unlock a good deal of side quests. These side quests unlock new moves, new training, new series of fights and best of all new characters. These characters all come with some funny or interesting dialog as well. What I loved as well is that the side quests can seemingly be unlocked at random. One random event may unlock a new location with a side quest way before you’d think it would otherwise happen. Throw in all the upgrades you can get and Punch Club is a game that will require a lot of your time to complete.

Overall Punch Club is a great game but sadly might get stuck with a particularly small audience. The fact that the game is more micromanaging than actual game play coupled with a large difficulty may swerve those casual fans away. For the ones that stick with it however will find a game that is deep with a lot to do inside of it.